


Once A Vengeful Spirit

by captainkilly



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, I can't write Frank or Karen without a smidge of dark edging in, Non-Graphic Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-17 02:19:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8126644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkilly/pseuds/captainkilly
Summary: "Frank Castle's dead. The Punisher's his ghost story."Karen Page's insistence sounds weaker to her own ears every single time.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This constitutes as the first very vague nsfw-ish thing I've ever written. *laughs nervously* It's also a semi-natural progression of a bond I think is too tight to ever snap and break entirely, no matter how much one may insist on a certain 'death'..

She thinks that she's going to put Ellison in hospital one day. Not by conscious choice or anything, because she actually sort of likes him when he's not being the world's worst slavedriver shouting "200 more words, Page!". But when he's yelling in her office the way he is now, with a small vein in his neck pulsating along with every word, she thinks she might already see that hospital reflected in his glasses.

"This is the third time in four months! The _third_! Even the most dimwitted police officer in the _universe_ is going to look at this and say 'hey, this reeks'. It _reeks_ , Page!"

"I know, I _know_." Her own voice is several decibels lower than his. Several degrees calmer, too. She's a little jumpy on the inside, but that's nothing new these days. "What do you want me to do? Place an ad that covers an entire page telling him to please stop killing everybody? Like that's going to help?"

Ellison inhales deeply. Exhales through his nostrils in angry huffs and puffs. She almost smiles at the familiarity. When his voice comes out next, it's a little calmer too. "I don't even know. I don't know what we have to do to get that psycho murderer -- yes, Page, _he is_ , stop arguing -- to understand that he can't just keep doing what he's been doing." He heaves a sigh. Almost slaps his own forehead in enthusiasm when his hand comes up to pinch the bridge of his nose. "Frank Castle just attacked an entire goddamn armed prisoner transport because the prisoner they were transporting looked at you the wrong way. How are you calm right now?"

"Frank Castle is dead." She barely shifts under the 'oh really'-gaze Ellison now levels at her. She's said the words enough times in the past year to make them count and sound truthful. She raises her own eyebrow back at him. "That prisoner held me at knifepoint and threatened to carve pretty angels out of my flesh because I was blonde like his ex-wife and wore the same heels she did. He was hardly a sane member of society!"

Ellison throws his hands in the air in reply. "You and Castle _deserve_ each other," he tells her acidly, "and don't you give me that bullshit about him being dead." He is already halfway through the door when he turns back to her. There's something more than annoyance in his expression, but she doesn't quite know what it is. "The Punisher lives in this city and he's made his mark on you."

"Frank Castle is dead." She repeats it, more to herself than to the retreating figure of her boss. "The Punisher is his ghost story." She doesn't know who she's trying to convince.

She goes back to work.

*

Trish isn't so easily swayed. The blonde levels her with a fierce stare over the third glass of tequila and shakes her head warningly. Her eyes flash in the light of Josie's new neon sign. Karen's always admired the woman's willingness to cut the crap and give it to her straight, but now she finds herself quailing under the look the way Jessica often does.

"Bull _shit_." Trish's cultured voice has the making of a lecture. "Ellison's right. I can't believe I just said that, but he is." Karen rolls her eyes in reply to that. Trish narrows her own eyes at her. Clips out words faster than Karen can down her liquor, which is saying something these days. "Don't you roll your eyes at me, you _know_ I'm right! He's not dead to you, he's still that same guy, he's someone you knew. God, he's like one of those ex-boyfriends that never goes away."

"We weren't together like that," she argues back. Knows it to be futile when the woman across the table snorts derisively in the most undignified way. "He's not the same. He burned his house down, Trish!"

"Girlfriend, I would've bet on him doing that before he actually did it. Doesn't mean he's changed now that he's gone and done it. He's still got that same modus operandi, right? Kill those who deserve it. Did you know that crime rates are dropping in all these areas he's hit over the past few months? Did you know that that slimy asshole you and lawyer crew landed in jail now has no fucking shot at extending his influence beyond his cell? _Of course_ you know, because surprise surprise.. he's not dead to you. No matter how much you tell Ellison he is. No matter how much you maintain that over drinks with me."

"I'm not in the mood for this."

"You never are. You have to talk about it sometime."

She downs the whole glass in one go. Splutters a little when it washes down her throat in a too-hot torrent of liquid flame. "I really don't," she tells her friend with more conviction than she feels. "There's nothing more to say."

Trish just looks at her for a long time while sipping from her own drink in a much more dignified manner. There's no judgment in her eyes or expression. There's no warning to stay away from these men, to stay away from vigilantes altogether. She knows that Trish has a heroic streak bigger than anyone's. Calls things as she sees them without backing away or apologising for saying them. Karen thinks that maybe, just maybe, the strength that lodged itself in her own bones over the past year is responding to that brand of honesty more than she wants it to. That maybe she has earned whatever protection and retribution the Punisher decides to deal out in her name. Earned it a thousand times over the second she set foot in his house and didn't run screaming.

She blinks. Shakes her head.

"You know what's best," Trish finally tells her with a shrug. Karen smiles in reply at that. The woman always knows when to let things go. Although, well.. _not quite_. "I'm just saying, you need to step outside sometime and look him straight in the eye." Her voice turns wry and a little teasing, now. Karen can't help but snort a laugh over it. "You're his height, right? Wear heels and kick his ass. I do that to Jess sometimes."

"Does it help?"

"Meh." Trish almost looks like she's considering it on a much deeper level than Karen asked for. Gulps down the remainder of her liquor in the meantime. "It mostly just makes me feel better."

She thinks of angry words shouted in the cold. Of a car ride stretched into an infinite and uncomfortable silence. Of a slammed door. Of loss and grief stretching her out and reshaping her into a person she doesn't recognise every time she gets up in the morning. Of a mask in the hands of someone she trusted.

She doesn't know if anything can feel better anymore.

*

Foggy understands it a little too well. She smiles at him when he seats himself across from her in the diner she picked out. It's one of those really retro-looking places she thinks look really cool and have the best waffles anyone could wish for. She tells him they're celebrating his major kickass promotion with maple syrup and watches him blanch in disgust a second later.

"Some things don't change, huh?" she tells him with a laugh. "I'm still Vermont trash and you are a city boy with no idea about how to eat waffles properly. Especially not now that you're wearing expensive suits, hello!"

"Waffles with maple syrup is as disgusting as yoghurt with mayonnaise."

She wrinkles her nose at him. Can't quite tell if he's serious about the mayonnaise part as having been something he actually ate. Decides he's having her on when he lets out a genuine laugh and digs into the waffle pile in front of them with all the haphazard manner of out-for-food Foggy. She's missed this. Tells him as much, too, moments later when her mouth's half-stuffed with baked goodies.

He stuffs his own mouth to the brim and tells her then that he's missed her too. There's some waffle in her hair and she's quite sure she's gone even paler from the powdered sugar he insisted to sprinkle over the waffles, but there's nothing like being with Foggy to lift her spirits. Even when there's a huge gaping hole at their sides that neither one of them seem to be able to fix.

"You didn't hear from him, did you?" His question's careful, like he knows exactly what's on her mind. "He didn't talk with you after he told you, right?"

"That's right." She brave-faces it even when it still hurts after all these months. To be the last on the list to trust. To be subject to lectures on ethics and morality when.. _well_. "Didn't hear anything. Did you?"

To some surprise, Foggy shakes his head too. "Off the face of the earth." His voice is sad, but there's resolve in his shoulders that never used to be there before. His time at Hogarth's law firm is doing him a whole world of good. She thinks Marci helps, too, though he'd never admit to that. "He's not in town. Or if he is, he seems perfectly fine letting the Punisher roam free."

Karen groans in annoyance. She can't seem to go a single conversation these days without the skull-bearing menace being thrown into it. Rubs her eyes tiredly for a moment before she fixates back on the waffles. If she eats enough, she might actually drown out the noise in the back of her head telling her that there's something unfinished there. Waffle-induced trance sounds really nice right about now.

"You think it's him."

"It is and it isn't." _Bam._ More honest than she's been with Ellison or Trish. She's got to stop this honest hero thing before she gets her ass handed to her. Observes Foggy's shift on the bench warily. "It's not the same guy who sat across from me all those months ago. I don't know if I'd still recognise him." See, that's a lie. She thinks she'd recognise Frank Castle even if someone blindfolded her and plugged her ears shut. Squashes that thought back down from wherever it came from. "But yeah it's him, kind of. I assume you heard about that prisoner transport.."

"That was our client. Hogarth got him life without parole."

"I know. Would've been enough for me."

That's a lie, again. She knows it the second she says it. Foggy doesn't seem to notice. But she knows it's a lie as much as Frank knows that only bullets stop the nightmares from getting into your waking moments. She doesn't think she'd have had a single night's sleep again if that cool blade to her throat, that part-murderous part-lustful voice, that hand on her hair had lived to see tomorrow. Frank knows that, too.

She wonders when exactly she decided to call him Frank again.

*

When she finally sees him, she's no longer the same person either.

She's taken to pinned-back hair and sensible shoes in recent months, tired of all the times someone dragged her up by the hair or made her sprint over the treacherous pavements of this city. Donated every single one of her pencil skirts and flowy tops to charity. She owns exactly two dresses and neither one of them is dragged out of her closet on a daily basis anymore. She's a jeans-and-shirt girl now, blending into the masses rather than sticking out like a sore thumb. After all this time, there's a comfort within that.

Trish insisted on teaching her the very basics of krav maga and putting on a face so fierce it could melt a glacier. Hogarth, after a long epic pause and careful deliberation, insisted on paying for boxing classes and handing out enough knowledge of the law to really make any criminal uncomfortable. She learned her bearings of 'get the hell out of my face' from Jessica in the rare moments of touching base, fueled by the mutual sense of no longer letting any man dictate their lives again. She's different now, shaped by the women rather than the men in her life.

Maybe that's why she regains her bearing faster than he does when she turns a corner and smacks square into him.

"Hi Frank," she tells him, once she's ascertained that both her coffee and her bearings are intact. He's always Frank to her now, no matter how dead everyone says he is.

He doesn't look a whole lot different from the last time she saw him. An angry purple bruise mottles his cheek. There's a cut above his eyebrow and yellowed skin around his eye that tells her stories about past bruises. He's nursing a cut lip and very small limp. The latter, she only spots because she knows how he carries his weight and he looks slightly off to her now. She almost smiles at him when she realises he's a jeans-and-shirt guy the moment he's not working. A part of her wonders when exactly she began filing the Punisher's actions away as 'work', but that's how it feels when he looks at her the way he does now. Like he can't quite believe her to be real. Can't categorise her the way he does other people.

"Ma'am," he tells her after what feels like a long stretch of minutes between them.

The smile that threatened to break forth just a second ago now stretches out into her features fully. She can't bite back the toothy grin she flashes at him as her eyes crinkle, nor can she stop the soft laugh that makes its way out of her throat. There's relief on the edge of the laugh, relief that sings _alive alive alive_ , and she can't stop taking him in now that he's standing right in front of her. He blinks at her slowly.

"Thank you." She's not really sure why that's the first thing she elects to say to him after her hello. Maybe it's because it's the one sentiment that floods her aside from 'alive' when she hears about his latest antics from either the police or Ellison. Maybe it's because she knows he didn't have to kill her demons, but chose to do so anyway. Whatever it is, she needs to say it. Have it hang in the air between them. "For, well.. you know."

He seems to weigh her for a moment. She can tell by the gravity of his gaze that that's what it is. It's a look she saw when he was anchored to the hospital bed and deliberating whether to let her stay. Whether to retract the invitation he'd given her to come closer. She stands there now and lets it happen. His eyes are hard when he scans her face. She doesn't know what he's looking for. Doesn't know what she'll do if he turns and walks away. If he doesn't let her in this time. There's a nervous flutter in her belly she doesn't want to categorise as butterflies.

"Had to," he finally says to her. His gaze softens as she lets out a breath she didn't know she had been holding. "For you."

She thinks Ellison might have been right in saying that they deserve each other. Thinks it because her answering smile turns a little bit vicious and the set of his shoulders becomes a little more welcoming for her worry to lean on. Thinks it because when she looks into his eyes it's like no time has passed at all, but somehow what happened before isn't something that's going to dictate their after. It's the first time the thought doesn't scare her.

She reaches out to him.

*

He sometimes carries vengeance with him when he walks through the door. His footsteps are a little louder and his face a little darker when that happens. She's learned to bend around his moods in the months since she reached for him anew. Learned to leave him coffee on the counter alongside the space in her bed that he never wants to take but somehow does at five in the morning when he's done talking himself hoarse. She's learned to fall asleep in the crook of his arm, listening to the rumble of anger in his chest and the hum of his steady breath.

She thinks she might get used to even the worst nights, when his knuckles are scraped raw and her hands grow slick with his blood. The dark times just before dawn when he's totally silent and the grip of his hand on her shoulder hurts and his eyes are too dark and wild for her to focus on. The spaces in their days when she's just crying and he looks at her like his heart's breaking over and over again, even when nothing's his fault and he helps he helps he helps. The moments when she wakes from her sleep and her stomach is rolling out a circus act and it takes too long for her to realise that the hands on her arms belong to someone who'd never hurt her.

She knows he wouldn't, even when he's not always sure.

Tonight's not one of those worst nights. Tonight's just weary footsteps and a sigh as he seats himself on his side of the bed. She rolls over in the bed before finally seating herself upright. They're well past apologies for him waking her, just as she's done inviting him under the covers before he's ready. She rakes her hand through her messy hair before leaning her cheek against his shoulder. He doesn't sound angry tonight.

"Bad job?" She asks, all the same, all the time. "How many?"

"Four. Sniper's job. Not too bad."

"You didn't get punched? Go you," she says with a slight smile. "Not too bad?"

"Found something in the rubble. Information."

She hums encouragingly. Snakes her arm around his waist lightly, barely skimming the fabric of his shirt. She wants to shake her head when the smell of gunpowder invades her nostrils. One of these days, nobody's going to believe her when she says the man she holds so close to her chest is dead to her. She fears the world can smell him on her the way they already see him in the set of her shoulders and her too-wide smiles. She doesn't want the world to catch up with them. Doesn't want it to invade her bedroom when that's the last space she has with him that's just theirs and not everyone's.

"They were kids, Kar." He pronounces the abbreviation of her name almost as 'care', which puts a vague smile on her face even when her brow furrows at what he's saying to her. "Files on kids. None older than twelve. Foreign, or poor, or something else that screams forgotten." He scrapes his throat. "I can't help.. I think of the guy I beat up in a shop. He offered me pornography. Kids, guaranteed younger than twelve."

"You think they're related," she murmurs in the quiet. Recognises his footsteps as grief instead of rage now that he's gone perfectly still against her. She knows his mind's on his own kids. She thinks of her brother fleetingly. Doesn't have to wonder at why there's grief in what he says to her. "It's possible. And if it is, we'll stop at nothing to get those kids somewhere safe. You know us." She laughs softly. "I'd put them all in this apartment if I had nowhere else to take them."

"Only if we also get that dog you were trying to talk me out of," he stipulates. She can tell by the tone in his voice that he'd take the kids over the dog if he had to. Smiles at that, too. "Don't care what your landlord says."

"All right. We'll fix this up. We always do." Her hand tightens her hold on him briefly. "Hey. I got you." She whispers it against his jaw before planting a brief kiss on it. Knows she can go that far with him by now when he's like this. "Let it go for the night. Come here, Frank.."

She sinks back onto the pillow and releases her hold on him. Her hand skims the side of his thigh before coming to rest on the bed. Sometimes, she falls asleep before he curls up on the bed with her. Sometimes, he leaves to seat himself in the only chair she keeps in the room.

Tonight's not a night of indecision or absence.

He turns to her only seconds later. She smiles when the dim light hits his face. That smile fades to a blush when his eyes focus on the nape of her neck and the mostly bare skin of her shoulder. She feels warmth spreading from her head to her toes at the look he gives her. He can probably see the flush of her skin now that he's leaning in closer.

They exhale at the same time. His is a noisy puff of breath; hers a quiet sigh.

She thinks tonight is altogether _new_ when he shifts on the bed until he's almost hovering over her. She's usually the one to initiate proximity and hold it there for him until he takes it. That's not new about tonight. What's new is the gaze that's settled on her now, as though he's come to a decision inside himself and is only now showing her the result of that. She considers that she may like the decision he's come to.

Knows she likes it when his lips press to hers none-too-gently and his hand skims the bare skin on her arm. He almost wavers for a moment. Pulls back from her slightly. She closes the distance between them so fast she'll later joke ' _speed of light_ ' about that particular kiss. Invites him in with her hands and her lips and her tongue and a giddy smile she can't stop from breaking out on her face.

He takes her welcome the second he presses a kiss to the nape of her neck and curls a hand into her hair. The trail of kisses he leaves on her make her tighten her hands on his shoulders. She wriggles against the soft touches for a moment until his teeth finally skim her skin. "Please," she tells him then inbetween a gasp and a sigh. Focuses her eyes back on his face. "Frank.."

"You want this?"

She laughs softly. "More," she says to him then. Watches his mouth curve into its own delicious smile at that. She doesn't think she'll ever grow tired of being the cause of that lightness in his eyes. Still, she is careful. Doesn't push. "If you want to.."

He silences her doubt with a kiss that is anything but gentle and hands on her skin that burn the last semblance of reason away in her brain. She feels she's already naked before him when he pulls back to gaze at her with a look in his eyes that's another kind of fierceness, another kind of love. The breath is sucked from her lungs upon that realisation.

She reaches for him moments later. Skims the skin just above his waistband before slipping a hand under his shirt. She brushes her nails lightly against him when he captures her mouth in another kiss. Pulls at the shirt until his skin is showing in a way that she laughs is ' _more even ground_ ' now that he's baring her shoulders fully and letting the straps of her nightgown fall off them carelessly. He makes a noise of assent deep in his throat that leads her to pull his shirt off him entirely.

She realises with a jolt that they make for one scarred-up pair when his fingers trace one of several knife injuries she's suffered and her own fingers run across a jagged scar on his chest. She can't meet him wound for wound and loss for loss, but she knows enough of both to have her skin be a counterweight against his own. She thinks it's no longer about _deserving_ each other. Maybe it's never been about that, not even during the early stages of his trial when all she could think of is how he made her feel less like a monster.

Maybe it's just been about _belonging_ all along.

She knows she's right when his hand moves up her thigh at an agonisingly slow pace and her voice turns into that jagged edge of impatient at just how slow he's going. Knows she's right when his hand skims her hip, her belly, her side before coming to rest between her legs in reassuring warmth and pressure that makes her eyes roll into the back of her head. She laughs shakily against him when she knows she's right and her body bends and curves against him in a way that makes all the pieces of their lives fit together.

He seems to know it too when she reaches for his hips and pulls him in so close against her that the pressure of his hand must be replaced with the pressure of his body. Hums his assent, his belonging, his _love_ into her hair the second her hips roll against him and her back curves under him. She believes she whispers it back in every kiss she leaves on his skin, every presence of it in the gentle words of encouragement she keens out at his touch, every smile that escapes her at being so close to the man she wants to hold onto with both hands and never let go of.

She thinks this is about _belonging_ long before he's inside her and she's all around him. Knows it's about _being_ when he holds her steady even as her legs begin to tremble and give way under him before he shatters in her arms.

Knows it's about _love_ when she doesn't know where he ends and she begins.


End file.
